Borders

CREATIVE PRODUCER

Rhae is a practicing artist, community development worker and regenerative practitioner from the Mallee. With fifteen years experience working in arts, culture and community development they bring systems thinking, creativity and collaboration to everything they do. Rhae is passionate about building strong rural and regional communities through embracing diversity, developing kinship with our natural resources and creating localised economies. In 2020 Rhae founded a social enterprise Regenerative Communities.

Rhae’s creative practice explores the intersections between body and place, with a practice grounded in Body Weather. Using performance, video, drawing and installation their art serves as a process for understanding systems awareness

WORKSHOP FACILITATOR

Linda has worked across multiple platforms in the performing arts for the past 20 years: as a performer, choreographer, director, mentor and facilitator. In her work, she aims to deepen sensitivity and excavate the subtle undercurrents we experience in relationship to self, each other and the environment. Linda’s work revolves around diminishing the ‘human-centric’ and aims to reinstate a focus on the rich diversity of non-human elements that exist in our environment.

A major part of Linda’s artistic practice is to engage with marginalized communities to mentor and develop artistic practice through movement, performance and film-making. Linda develops frameworks and methods to give to various communities for them to engage and create from.

WORKSHOP FACILITATOR

Peter works widely in site-specific performance, dance, improvisation and installations. His primary focus is the transformations that occur where body and environment meet and mingle. His guiding practice is Body Weather which is, fundamentally, an attitude of continual inquiry into embodiment in place: his workshops aim to release the body from habits so that it is available to transformation by imagination and bodily sensation.

Peter co-founded Environmental Performance Authority (EPA) which focuses on site specific projects that are participatory in their development and in their implementation.

RESIDENT ECOLOGIST

Craig found his way to the Mallee like many others; by following the Murray river. After working as a freshwater ecologist in the Albury area, he moved downstream to Mildura in 2018 to work at the Murray Darling Freshwater Research Centre. He quickly took root in the region, developing an understanding of the deeper connections within the community and find his sense of place within it.

Craig brings to the Borders project a passion for the unique ecology of the Murray River regions, and innate curiosity for the subtle nuances of landscapes. When trying to study the complex interactions of an ecosystem, it often seems easier to remove yourself from the equations. But in doing so, you ignore the fact that we are inextricably connected to everything around us.

CULTURAL ADVISOR

Mark Grist is an Australian Aboriginal man. He belongs to the peoples of the Wergaia, Wamba Wamba and Nyeri Nyeri of northwest Victoria.

Mark is a qualified archaeologist who studied at the Australian National University majoring in archaeology and anthropology. Mark has spent many years recording and protecting Aboriginal heritage sites throughout Australia and has been at the forefront of recording biological information from Australian Aboriginal Ancestral remains, contributing significantly to the return of Ancestral remains to various Aboriginal communities throughout Australia.

PROJECT MENTOR

Vic McEwan is the Artistic Director of the Cad Factory, an artist led organisation creating an international program of new, immersive and experimental work guided by authentic exchange, ethical principles, people and place.

Vic’s contemporary art practice works with sound, video, photography, installation and performance, with a particular interest in site-specific work that creates new dynamics by working with diverse partners and exploring difficult themes within the lived experience of communities and places. Vic aims to use his work to contribute to and enrich broader conversations about the active role that the arts sector can play in reimagining a better world.